Imagine you’re at a youth football game on a beautiful Saturday morning. Player number 33 catches your eye. Must be nine years old. He wants nothing more than to please the coach. He is trying his absolute hardest every play. And all of a sudden he is getting yelled at for it. Really getting yelled at by the coach in front of God and his parents and buddies, and he doesn’t even understand why. Sadly, this is a true story; it happens every week in which youth sports happen, all across our nation.
These unfortunate situations occur because the coaches expect developing players to do things they can no more do than a legless person can walk stairs. They make this mistake because they don’t understand the player’s stage of development or how to coach considering it, and now the kid is suffering. Then expecting that player to deal with getting yelled at for the coach’s mistake without crying, or getting upset or frustrated is not toughening them up – and it may be emotionally damaging.
It seems that there are three reasons that (crazily) this is still a common occurrence:
- The leagues have no oversight.
- The parent-coaches are not trained.
- This is how we’ve always done it.
1) Considering that the United States are made up of over three thousand counties and at least that many youth sports clubs dealing with different local governments and committees, affecting change over the first reason seems like an overly formidable task. If we could nail the second and third, it might help.
2) By putting young parents in charge of groups of kids as ‘coaches’ without any training, we open two big cans of worms; first, it is likely their only coach role models are college and NFL coaches, and second, unless they are school teachers, they don’t know about Jean Piaget.
Jean Piaget detailed how kids learn, and the stages of that intellectual development. The reason the above scenario occurs is that coaches often require players to do things that seem incredibly simple to the coach, who assumes it seems as simple to the player, though the player’s intellectual/cognitive development has not yet reached the point where the coach is making any sense, and just sounds like Charlie Brown’s teacher.
There are a virtually unlimited number of resources about Piaget and coaching that go beyond the depth of this brief blog. For more info about Piaget try https://www.khanacademy.org/ and for a wonderful video presentation titled ‘Coaching Youth Sports’ click here: https://youtu.be/ovCFN2gVRgM
3) Reason number three is of course the most dangerous and most difficult to overcome. Effectively saying, “Well, we’ve been abusing our kids this way for 50 years and they all seemed to come out OK, so why should we change now?” doesn’t seem like anything anyone would say out loud – and they probably wouldn’t using those words. But variations of it exist that almost sound reasonable – we’ve all heard one here and there, and not necessarily about youth sports!
If the coaches get trained, even solely by watching the eleven minute video listed above, there will be, at least to some degree, a de facto change in “this is how we’ve always done it”.
Coaches coach and parents parent and each should be left alone to do their respective job – right up until a coach is yelling or cursing at a kid for trying his hardest. At the very least, it is at that point appropriate for the parent to direct the coach to some training material and/or calmly express their wish that their child be dealt with differently.
Which brings up back to Reason number one: no league or coach oversight. The answer is the same: education. The more educated the coaches and parents and league administrators are, the fewer crying, frustrated kids we’ll have, trying to figure out why they’re in trouble when they didn’t do anything wrong!
How we’ve always done it doesn’t matter. Do it better today America. Do it better coaches. Learn about ol’ Jean Piaget – he was a pretty sharp dude.
Steve Kloser is a retired teacher and former high school football official.
